Cardiac Mapping: Approaches from an Engineering Perspective

Download or read book Cardiac Mapping: Approaches from an Engineering Perspective written by Ying-Chu Lo and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prevalence of atrial fibrillation has increased significantly. Several focal areas within the heart which trigger atrial fibrillation have been identified by physicians. There are a number of ways to lessen and treat atrial fibrillation. Ablating the focal areas is one of the therapies to alleviate or stop the symptoms, especially using radiofrequency as an energy source to perform the ablation. Before performing the radiofrequency ablation, an electrophysiologist needs to acquire cardiac information in as much detail as possible. This information includes heart surface geometry, electrical activation sequences, electrical activities times and volumes, etc. A successful radiofrequency ablation requires precise cardiac geometry reconstruction and accurate focal areas localization. A number of novel computer-aided 3-dimension cardiac reconstruction mapping technologies are able to integrate with Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and body surface ECG to provide comprehensive cardiac anatomical structures and information to users during the overall ablation procedure. These cardiac mapping systems also provide real-time cardiac information to operators and identify the complex fractionated atrial electrograms (CFAEs) for ablation purposes. The principles of fluoroscopy-based cardiac images heart surface reconstruction are reviewed. An optimization algorithm (Hill climbing algorithm) is introduced to approach and identify the CFAEs.